Articles Tagged with science communication

Brass, glass and verniers

Scientists of yesterday were different

sextantOur astronomer and our navigator are away from headquarters at the moment, showing a Professor of Physics how to use his sextant.  This style of instrument was the mainstay of nineteenth-century astronomy: made of brass and glass, with precise scales engraved on them for careful measurements.  The people who used them had to work in a different way from current astronomers and must have had a different approach to life.

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The color of parchment

Scientists and scholars in partnership

filterbookOne of the advantages of living in the Washington, DC area is the wealth of cultural opportunities. Expositions of science, history and the arts are going on all the time. Our astronomer attended one of these recently, telling the story of how multicolor imaging allowed scholars to read a text that had been erased centuries ago.

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The unnecessary theory

General Relativity textbookYou will have heard of the detection of gravitational waves, just announced this past week. For once the mass media haven’t over-hyped a scientific discovery: this really is an important find. We’re not going to try to explain the science behind it (there are lots of articles on line and offline that do that). It’s the fact of the 100-year gap between the theoretical prediction and the actual observation that tells us something about the nature of science.

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Getting your universe right

Our service providing science help for writers

lensYour novel, novella, short story or epic poem has everything:

  • Ingenious plot
  • Scintillating dialogue
  • Believable and interesting characters

Shouldn’t you also get the universe right?

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The strange case of the dimming star

A good and bad example of current science

Our astronomer begs to be allowed to explain what’s really interesting about KIC8462852.

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No more libraries?

Electronics replaces paper

Books on shelvesFor many purposes, books are no longer necessary. That is, for entertainment or learning one need not find or carry around a pile of bound paper. The internet contains a vast landscape of information and e-books are ubiquitous. So do will still need places to borrow paper books from—libraries? Or librarians?

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Why the first of January?

Beginnings are arbitrary, but important

January 2016 calendarWhy does the year begin on the first of January?

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More on paradoxers

Some features of the species

Our chief consultant writes:

piSome weeks ago I mentioned paradoxers, those people from outside a certain science who come up with some amazing or important result that, sadly, is not accepted by those inside–mostly because it’s not true.  I promised to describe the outstanding characteristics of this fascinating species; here are two.

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Learning the stories

Using words instead of math

Here on the 100th birthday of General Relativity our science consultants were pondering why Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were so easy for them to accept but so hard for people a century ago.  Certainly it’s not because we’re more insightful or brighter scientists–quite the opposite.  Nor is it that we’re better at math; again the opposite is true, and these are highly mathematical subjects.  We finally concluded that we’re comfortable with the theories because we were told the stories, word-descriptions of what the math means, from an early stage and so the theories never seemed impossibly strange.  The stories are important.  But it’s also important for both scientists and laymen to understand their limitations.

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It’s about time

Not about saving daylight

watchWe’ve just gone through the annual ritual of Falling Back, shifting our clocks by an hour to conform to Standard Time. It’s the regular opportunity for scientists to point out, with either smugness or exasperation, that all summer we haven’t really been Saving Daylight; that there is exactly the same amount of daylight regardless of what our clocks read. Sometimes they wander off into explanations of Local Solar Time, Standard Time Zones and, if not quickly stopped, bring up atomic clocks.

Here we will avoid that sort of thing. In the interests of understanding other people, or at least building character, we’ll look at time from the standpoint of non-scientists. It’s not the same time as we understand, and translation is in order.

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